Fascinating read.
(And by any chance did I enter a time warp and go back to 2019 to post this comment I wrote in 2022?)
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True classics
Really good article and illustrations but where's Virgil Finlay?
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In 8th grade English lit in Seattle, the assignment was to write a short story. At the time I was immersed in Tom Swift and spent all allowance money and earnings subscribing to at least 2 sci fi magazines. I devoured Heinlein, Asimov, Doyle, Clarke, Bradbury, Le Guin, Vonnegut and more. So I wrote what I thought (and still think) was a good sci f short story. It was graded a D-, the only grade I ever received under a B. The comment was that sci fi was not literature and not worthy of reading. The genre has advanced! I still consider good sci fi as philosophy packaged for ease of digestion. Thanks for the article. David
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@DJB for what it's worth, your English teacher was an idiot. sadly, there is always one of that ilk in every school. I attended a very progressive public school in NJ, was in the advanced track [we were the original nerds] and even then still ran into a young and grossly uninformed English teacher with a similar mindset.
In retrospect as a science fiction reader in the 40's and 50's I can never understand why there were no computers or micro technology in the stories.
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What a delignt. The comments early in the article about how science fiction has become so central to our culture had me expecting illustrations of the cliches: robots, jet packs, giant space ships blasting at alien monsters, and scantily clad women being carried off by those alien monsters. But no, the variety of styles and complexity of subjects of the choices is quite true to my memories of SF magazine covers (though I am not actually old enough to have seen many of these when they originally came out).
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As a 12 year old in 1939 I avidly read and collected issues of Astounding SF and its companion Unknown Worlds after exhausting what H.G. Wells and Jules Verne had to offer. The outstanding contributions of Asimov and Heinlein and several others such as Padget and authors that had backgrounds in science and engineering put the quality of material much above that in competing magazines and the scientific articles by Wiley Ley made me well acquainted with advanced scientific concepts as a teen ager so that when the first A bombs hit Japan I was one of the few GIs in the US Air Force who understood what had occurred . It took a couple of decades before J.W.Campbell's story "Who Does There?" got a proper treatment in Hollywood as Carpenter's "Thing From Outer Space" as was true of many of the very imaginative stories published in the magazine .
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Nice review of early Sci-Fi graphics. A worthy companion article would cover early Sci-Fi movie posters.
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I liked the comic strip "Our New Age," by Athelstan Spilhaus, which ran in weekend newspapers in the 1960s. It dealt with the wonderful future - amazing inventions, splendid cities, life of leisure - that people were looking forward to.
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